Chandler Living Legacy Award

Tom & Kari Whitehead

Chandler Living Legacy Award

Named for Curt and Stacie Chandler, the Chandler Living Legacy Award honors an exemplary Pennsylvania native or Pennsylvania State University alumnus who has made distinguished contributions to the film, television, and media arts and to social justice movements. The fact that the Whiteheads and the Chandlers, for whom the award is named, both have ties to Philipsburg makes this award especially poignant.

The Whiteheads’ deeply-felt commitment over the course of many years to document Emily’s story of survival and their own resilience on difficult emotional terrain, foregrounds the roles of cinematographer as witness, advocate, and healer. Their multiple positions in front of and behind the camera, demonstrate an inherent understanding of the power of the moving image as a catalyst for social change. They have used the “humble” medium of home video as an instrument of storytelling that affirms human connection and documents the epic struggle to insist on living. Through their eyes, the particularity of their parental love allows for others more broadly to find hope as they, too, grapple with cancer themselves or with supporting loved ones.

“One of the reasons we made the film, is that the footage is so striking,” said Academy Awardwinning director Ross Kauffman. “For me, the footage captures a form of faith, to have the belief that this is the right thing to do, and this is the right direction to go. In the midst of all the pain, they both picked up a camera. When we watched it, it felt so visceral, it felt like love. In a way, it is an archive of footage celebrating joy in the face of such difficulty.”

If they hadn’t thought to document their journey, there would be no film to chart the movement that resulted in ground-breaking cancer research, and their establishment of the Emily Whitehead Foundation that funds innovative childhood cancer treatments. The footage provides the anchor for making Of Medicine and Miraclessuch a powerful tool for social change.

Kari Whitehead, MS, RDN, is a registered dietician/nutritionist, and a research project coordinator at Penn State University. Tom Whitehead is a keynote speaker, author, and journeyman lineman for Penelec, a FirstEnergy Company. They are the proud parents of Emily and co-founders of the Emily Whitehead Foundation in honor of their daughter Emily who was diagnosed at age five with an aggressive form of leukemia that failed to respond to chemotherapy. As a last hope, Emily was enrolled in a clinical trial and became the first pediatric patient in the world to receive CAR T-cell therapy. The therapy worked and Emily is now 10 years cancer free and considered cured.